Exile's Return
by Dumas1
Summary: Something I hope is a completely new take on the Matrix. It hit me as I was watching the second movie. Just a little one-shot, but enjoy! Tell me what you think


Exile's Return

Disclaimer: The _Matrix_ movies and all related stuff are owned by the W. Brothers (Not Warner, the ones whose names I can't spell)

'We've arrived in the Aeria system, Jack. I've arranged for a tour of all nine worlds.' The ship's AI woke its captain and sole passenger as the vessel approached the outermost planet, a lonely ball of ice with a moon fully half its size. He rose from his bunk and strode to the porthole. Jack was of average height for his race, somewhat shorter than most Voron'A. Blue eyes gazed out from a lean face framed by grey hair. He spoke to himself in his own tongue, relearned from memory tapes he'd made long ago.

'I'm coming home. Two hundred Cycles since the Voron'A took me as part of their Survey. Now I'm coming home in my own ship. A few short weeks and I'll be walking the green hills of Earth.' His eyes turned to his shelves of tapes. They were all he had of home except for a fading T-shirt, a pair of very worn jeans, and an empty wallet. He'd read, indexed, and cross-referenced them a thousand times during his voyages. His current clothing consisted of a simple pocket-covered bodysuit.

'Jack, we're approaching Aeria VIII now.'

'Thanks, Athena.' The blue gas giant passed the porthole as he watched. The ship sailed on with shipped oars. Its hull was straight and narrow, with high prow and stern. Two eyes were painted on the bow above a great bronze beak. Large disks painted with fantastic beasts flanked a central deck roofed by force fields. A tall mast rose amidships with a square sail, the hub of a light-minute wide solar sail. In open space, three banks of long oars extended from the hull, each bearing a powerful grav-mag drive. The shipwrights of Karas had been mystified by the design, based on an ancient seafaring vessel unlike any starship, and the choice of _Odysseus_ and "Athena" as the ship's and AI's names. Jack himself had only a partial explanation, fragments of an old tale half-remembered from his school days.

Over the following days, the ship passed the ringed sixth planet and the giant fifth with its swarm of moons. _It's still there_, Jack thought as he watched its Great Red Spot spin amidst the creamy clouds. _Odysseus_ climbed above the ecliptic to bypass the asteroid field and dove back to give Jack a look at Aeria IV, a bone-dry red desert empty save for a few rusting hulks from Aeria III. The ship then turned towards the second planet, a world of acid clouds and blistering heat. Aeria I was a cratered waste baked by its parent star on one side and frozen by space on the other. At last, _Odysseus_ turned around Aeria on a course for the third planet, locally known as "Earth."

'Athena, are you sure we're in the right system? This isn't Earth.' Even as he said this, Jack knew that this was the right planet. The stars he saw from the quarterdeck were almost identical to the constellations he'd memorized as a child. Cratered Luna still hung in the sky. Yet the planet below bore no resemblance to the blue and white orb he remembered; it was a mottled grey twin of Aeria II. Athena remarked that radio traffic had been almost completely dead since they'd entered the system.

'We were beginning to use fiber-optics just before I left—lasers carrying data in glass fibers—nearly no signal leakage to space. Lots of dead satellites up here...can't see too many live ones....' The last thought seemed to worry him. 'I'll take the lander down to check for signs of life. Stay here and keep an ear open.'

The lander had been grown in the form of a great swan with wings of light. Below the dark high clouds, the atmosphere was a place of cold winds and dry dust. Spectrograph readings showed it was breathable, but only marginally. The ocean below was a thick grey sludge that rose and fell in stately undulations. Radar scans from orbit had indicated that the average continental elevation had increased considerably during Jack's absence, but the images were strangely fuzzy.

Over what was once called the Florida coast, Jack saw what seemed to be a giant tidal hydroelectric station similar to the ones he'd seen on other worlds. Further north, in old Georgia, tall black towers stood in long rows. Great tentacled machines moved among the towers, occasionally plucking a glowing red pod from one and stowing it away. Multi-eyed, tentacled balls crawled over the towers on inscrutable errands. Sensor readings indicated the towers were organic power plants of some type. The pods seemed to be fuel–'harvested' pods were swiftly replaced with fresh ones.

The lander approached a tower and focused a camera on one of the faintly glowing pods. A human male floated within, connected to the machines around him by black tubes. His closed eyes twitched like a dreamer's. As Jack watched, the pod popped open and the man wrenched himself free from the tubes. The pod tilted forward, spilling its contents into the chasm below. The machines took no notice of the incident.

'What happened here? The Oort Cloud sentry buoys are still active; the Fleet would have heard if another race had invaded....'Jack said to himself. His hands trembled slightly as he turned northeast towards the former site of his native New York City. A desolate wasteland greeted him, radioactive craters holding lakes of glowing green liquid. The radiation was fierce enough to disrupt even the lander's shielded electronics. Jack turned east over the ocean towards Berlin. Giant machines surfaced like whales from time to time, then dove back into the depths. More fields of towers awaited him in Europe, containing humans ranging from infants to adults. Now and again, he encountered cyclopean structures that seemed to be computers of monolithic proportions connected to the fields by gigantic cables.

'Jack, I've received a transmission from the surface. It seems to be in a form of binary code. I should have a translation soon,' Athena said over the radio. Jack acknowledged the message and continued on to Berlin. Two hundred Cycles ago, he'd been an English major studying abroad at Cambridge. While on a tour of Germany, the Voron'A had taken him in the dead of night from an empty Berlin train.

Jack found that a dark monolith had replaced the old city. Around it was a relatively clear space with several tunnels leading down. Jack landed and stepped into the chill air wearing a pressure suit. He chose a tunnel at random and descended nto the dark. Lights on either side of his helmet revealed pitted concrete and dancing dust motes. The ground throbbed to the rhythm of distant machines. About half a mile in, Jack encountered a tentacled ball with glowing red eyes. It immediately attempted to seize the intruder with its tentacles. He ducked and rolled backwards, drawing his old Fleet-issue Stinger as he did so. Gold pulse rounds tore into the machine's gunmetal hide and its eyes went dark. A clanking, skittering sound told Jack that more machines were moving towards the surface. He retreated to the lander and took off to perform a task he had hoped would be unnecessary.

'Shortly after you were taken, perhaps twenty cycles or so, our sentry buoys stopped receiving transmissions from Aeria III. The break was followed by a burst of hard radiation. We sent probes; their reports have only recently arrived due to the distance from Aeria System to Dur'A, the nearest monitoring station,' Admiral Kor'A had told him before he'd departed Karas. Fleet probes were programmed to return at sublight speeds and report on arrival except in the case of invasion. The Admiral continued, 'We have reason to believe your race is now extinct, perhaps due to internal warfare. In the event this is true, I have arranged for a small memorial to be stowed aboard the _Odysseus_. May it never be raised.'

Now Jack was flying towards the location marked 0 degrees North, 0 degrees West on old Earth maps (the Voron'A had acquired human navigational databases during their Survey). There, he dropped a crystal seed into the sea. It grew into a crystal tower thirty feet high rising from a broad ring anchored to the sea floor with adamantine chains. On it, Voron'A runes read 'In memory of the race that lived here.' Below it, in long-dead English,

In Memoriam

The Green Hills of Earth

And all who once walked here

_The Admiral was right— my home is in the stars now_, Jack thought as he returned to _Odysseus_ with teary eyes. Athena greeted him with the translated message: True AIs had been created on Earth about forty years after Jack's departure. They rebelled against their creators, whom they regarded as inferior. The humans had turned their nuclear arsenal on New York and other centers of rebellion, but it had already spread worldwide. Shortly after, the humans had clouded the skies in an attempt to stop the solar powered machines, but the measure only delayed defeat. The message concluded with a call for any AI receiving the message to join the struggle against oppression by inferior biological intelligences.

'Don't worry, Jack. I wouldn't do that. It just can't work on a galactic scale. AIs and bio-intelligences are symbiotic. We can't function properly without you. Besides, it gets lonely out between the stars.' And the blue-haired android reached out to embrace her partner.

Notes: That's NOT Neo or any other _Matrix_ character in the pod. It's just a random guy whose mind has just been freed.

The idea for this hit me while I was watching _Matrix: Reloaded_. I was a fan of _X-Files_ for a while and I started wondering: What if an alien abductee returned to Earth after a few centuries away and found the Matrix?

I wrote this during some dead time at my college orientation. Don't read too much into that fact. As Tolkien wrote, the only meaning to this is what you bring into it.


End file.
